@inproceedings{song-etal-2025-peeled,
    title = "Is a Peeled Apple Still Red? Evaluating {LLM}s' Ability for Conceptual Combination with Property Type",
    author = "Song, Seokwon  and
      Lee, Taehyun  and
      Ahn, Jaewoo  and
      Sung, Jae Hyuk  and
      Kim, Gunhee",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.456/",
    pages = "9028--9048",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
    abstract = "Conceptual combination is a cognitive process that merges basic concepts, enabling the creation of complex expressions. During this process, the properties of combination (e.g., the whiteness of a peeled apple) can be inherited from basic concepts, newly emerge, or be canceled. However, previous studies have evaluated a limited set of properties and have not examined the generative process.To address this gap, we introduce the Conceptual Combination with Property Type dataset (CCPT), which consists of 12.3K annotated triplets of noun phrases, properties, and property types. Using CCPT, we establish three types of tasks to evaluate LLMs for conceptual combination thoroughly.Our key findings are threefold:(1) Our automatic metric grading property emergence and cancellation closely corresponds with human judgments.(2) LLMs, including OpenAI{'}s o1, struggle to generate noun phrases which possess given emergent properties.(3) Our proposed method, inspired by cognitive psychology model that explains how relationships between concepts are formed, improves performances in all generative tasks.The dataset and experimental code are available at https://github.com/seokwon99/CCPT.git."
}